Mobile Browsing Popular in Atlantic Canada

Atlantic Canadians are captivated by mobile surfing, according to a new poll (conducted by Ipsos-Reid on behalf of Rogers Wireless). The poll suggests that 26 per cent of wirelessly connected Canadians aged 18-34 are accessing the Web from their mobile devices everyday, and of that, 65 per cent are browsing from their mobiles multiple times a day.

So what are Canadians doing when they mobile surf? The study found that 70 per cent of wirelessly connected Canadians are accessing the mobile Internet for personal e-mail and that thirty-six per cent of respondents use mobile devices to search for information. More than one quarter are browsing the web from their mobiles at least once a day, with half of those accessing popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter directly from their mobile devices.

This study is out just as the HTC Dream and HTC Magic smartphones, the first cellphones in Canada powered by the Android platform, are preparing for their big Canadian debut (on Rogers’ 3.5,  7.2 Mbps High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) network).

Both handsets feature a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus and camcorder mode, which allows users to film video and upload directly from their handset to YouTube. Both handsets also feature an accelerometer for sensing movement and a digital compass for complete orientation data, as well as microSD storage that’s expandable up to 16GB. Canadians can experience the joy of Android on June 2, 2009.

Text Language: A Guide to Understanding Text Messaging and Text Faces

With the rise in usage of real time text-based communications, such as cell phone text messaging (SMS), instant messaging, e-mail, and online gaming came the emergence of a new text language tailored to the immediacy and compactness of these new communication media.

To help you understand what friends and family are really saying in those quick text messages, Webopedia has put together several guides to help you decipher the abbreviated text language lingo and to assist you in using different online communication applications.

• Text Message and Chat Abbreviations: If you have ever received a text message or you have been in an online chat room, instant messenger, or on a game server and the messages seem to be in its own foreign language, this Webopedia Quick Reference will help you decipher the text language by providing the definitions to over 1,000 text and online chat abbreviations.

• Text Faces (Smiley Faces) and Emoticons: A ‘smiley face’, often called a text face, smiley face, or emoticon, is used in text communications to convey an emotion with a text message. this Webopedia Quick Reference offers step-by-step instructions to understanding and creating your own text faces.

• A Guide to Understanding eBay, Auction and Classified Ad Acronyms:  Internet and online classified lingo has also grown. Abbreviations and acronyms on eBay and other sites are important to sellers.This Webopedia Quick Reference will help you decipher what sellers are saying in their online ads.

• A Guide to Online Forum Etiquette: Forums are an online discussion areas where you can post and read messages from other users with similar interests, usually in an organized thread layout. The Webopedia Forum Etiquette Guide can help you learn forum language, and offers tips to keep new users from being banned.

• Webopedia “Did You Know… Internet Grammar Concerns?” With new technology comes new jargon, and often it takes years before we can agree on the proper spelling and usage of words that seep into our vocabulary from common usage.

• Webopedia Quick Reference: A Guide to Public IM Services: From AIM to Meebo to Yahoo Messenger, here’s a list of the leading public (and free) instant messaging services.

Read the Webopedia Guides to Texting (Messaging) here.

The Difference Between a Cell Phone, Smartphone and PDA

Once again technological advancements make common terminology such as mobile phone, smartphone, PDA and PDA phone difficult to decipher as each type of device changes constantly and features traditionally belonging to one type of device are now found on others.

“So starting with the difference between smartphones, as we’ve discussed above: When capitalized, it refers to Microsoft’s Smartphone platform, which is used for a variety of mobile devices. The latest version, Windows Mobile 6 actually removes the word Smartphone from its title, and over time this should help lessen the confusion between smartphone and Smartphone. Interestingly, one of the three versions of Windows Mobile 6 is called Windows Mobile 6 Standard for Smartphones. Here the “For Smartphones” means “phones without touch screens”.”

The Difference Between a Cell Phone, Smartphone and PDA
By Vangie Beal, May 02, 2008